"Hearing this Leonard Cohen stuff, after listening to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers it was like ‘this sounds like bullshit!’, I didn’t understand the layers of intellect that had gone into making that record, and the large element of humour. My dad is into Leonard Cohen, I remember hearing the older stuff, then my sister was getting into it because she was becoming very literary. I was basically absorbing Leonard Cohen but I wasn’t crazy about it. I remember hearing ‘The Story Of Isaac’ as a child and thinking ‘god, this is fully intense, it’s so bare’. I remember hearing I’m Your Man it and at first finding it a really odd, unenjoyable experience, but now I realise that it’s a very curious idea, this industrial Leonard Cohen record, it’s really cool! ‘First We Take Manhattan’, imagine being a musician and being able to put a song like that out."

"I'm getting the hardcore folk records out of the way first! This is another family group of five brothers and a sister from Billingham who were a big part of my childhood. I've seen them live many times. Their harmonies are properly spine-tingling, and it's so intuitive, the way they sing together. They sing lots of the songs of Graeme Miles, who lived and worked in Teeside, a man who worked in different industries to write songs informed by people's experiences. Another song of his called ‘Sea Coal', about people collecting coal washed up on the shore and then selling it cheaply, is one we do. God, they're such evocative songs. I've also sung some of his songs recently with Paul Smith from Maximo Park, who's from Billingham too – we've basically made an album together. That's to come! He's a real folk-lover. They're everywhere, you know.
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